Hmm…. I think not. St. Augustine mentioned St. Theogenus, but he doesn’t really give a sermon about him. And he mentions him in more than one sermon, and a letter also.

Let’s take a look at this fellow.

St. Theogenus was a former bishop of Hippo Regius. He was martyred. He may have been a contemporary of Cyprian and attended the Council of Carthage in 256. The very name "Theo-genus" harks to rebirth in God by baptism. In ancient times, the newly baptized, called infantes, took names which reflected their new state of spiritual rebirth and adoption, their new sonship, e.g., Adeptus, Regeneratus, Renatus, Deigenitus, Theogonus.

The Council of Carthage in 256 seems to have quoted St. Theogenus in Sententiae episcoporum numero 87 de haereticis baptizandis:

Theogenes ab Hippone Regio dixit: Secundum sacramentum dei gratiae caelestis, quod accepimus, unum baptismum, quod est in ecclesia sancta, credimus. … Theogenus from Hippo Regius said: According to God’s sacrament of heavenly grace, which we received, we believe to be one sacrament, which is in the Holy Church.

In one of Augustine’s newly discovered letters, ep. 26*,1 we find that there was a church of Hippo dedicated to St. Theogenus where a certain Donantius of Suppa, who had fraudulently attempted to get himself ordained a deacon, was placed as Porter, in order to keep him out of trouble, but when Augustine was gone, the priests threw him out. Oh well… moving right along….

In s. 272B shows that on the day of Pentecost, there was a service at the Church of St. Theogenus in Hippo, almost as at a Roman "station", and a passage was read from the Book of Tobit. Theogenus is probably connected with other martyrs, like St. Fructuosus.

In s. 273 St. Theogenus is mentioned among others by St. Augustine in order to make a point about how Christians actually honor God when the honor martyr saints. This is worth reviewing. We have heard the accusations of ignorant protestants about Catholic veneration of saints.

7. And yet, dearly beloved, while those [pagan] gods are in no way at all to be compared to our martyrs, we don’t regard our martyrs as gods, or worship them as gods. We don’t provide them with temples, with altars, with sacrifices. Priests don’t make offerings to them; perish the thought! These things are provided for God; or rather these things are offered to God, by whom all thigs are provided for us. Even when we make the offereing at the shrines of the holy martyrs, don’t we offer it to God? The holy martyrs have their place of honor. Notice please; in the recitation of names at the altar of Christ, their names are recited in the most honored place; but for all that, they are not worshiped instead of Christ.

When did you ever hear it said by me at the shrine of St. Theogenus, or by any of my brethren and colleagues, or by any priest, "I am offering to you, St. Theogenus"? Or, "I’m offering to you, Peter," or "I am offering to you, Paul"? You never did; it doesn’t happen, it is not permitted. And if you should be asked, "Do you, then, worship Peter?" answer what Eulogius answered about Fructuosus: "I do not worship Peter, but I worship God, whom Peter also worships." The Peter loves you. Because if you want to treat Peter as God, you stumble over the rock, and take care you don’t break your foot by stumbling over the rock.

Oh… by the way… today is also the anniversary of the death of St. Paula (+404), the friend and patroness of St. Jerome, living in Jerusalem.

I have been reading articles on this blog off and on for a month, and have been deeply impressed by Fr. Z’s scholarship and breath of knowledge of just about everything about the Church.
I just which some of the articles we’vre read about the “Moto Proprio” and other strict rulings of the Pope would come to pass.

I have been impressed by the love of Catholic traditions, and art, music and culture on this site.

I think Fr. Z would make a wonderful Bishop, and a fantastic example for priests to follow….so many of whom in the USA at least whom I bet don’t even pray their Divine Office, or even own the text at all.

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Food For Thought

“The legalization of the termination of pregnancy is none other than the authorization given to an adult, with the approval of an established law, to take the lives of children yet unborn and thus incapable of defending themselves. It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation, and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”

- St. John Paul II

A bit more food for thought…

“Only one sin is nowadays severely punished: the attentive observance of the traditions of our Fathers. For that reason the good ones are thrown out of their places and brought to the desert.”

For your consideration…

"One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting."

- C.S. Lewis

More food for thought:

“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

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More food for thought…

"All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution are null and void."

- Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137, 176

Even More Food For Thought

"Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:
1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests."

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Additional Food For Thought

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Food For Thought

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

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